Section 31: Rogue (star trek: the next generation) Read online

  The controls resolutely refused to respond. What the hell was she dealing with here?

  Blaylock spun her chair toward Burdick, whom Harding was helping back into his seat. Blood surged into the ensign’s eyes from a gash on his forehead.

  “Status report!” Blaylock snapped.

  Harding, the more experienced officer, began consulting a nearby undamaged instrument panel. “The shields are down. We’ve got hull breaches all over the place and we’re down to battery power.”

  “I need to see what’s out there. Can you get that screen working, Lieutenant?”

  “I’m on it.” Harding tapped a console at a furious pace.

  The bridge lights dimmed. “Try not to lose the mood lighting, Zaena,” Blaylock said. Harding smiled weakly in response.

  The viewer came to life in a brief burst of static. Stars shone whitely, no longer distorted by the subspace phenomenon. And something else was there as well. A shape . . .

  “Can you increase the magnification?” Blaylock said.

  Harding nodded. The lights dimmed further and the half-seen shape resolved itself into lines of hard metal. It was a large, toroid-shaped ship—or perhaps it was a space station—circled by dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of much smaller objects. Buoys? Service modules of some sort?

  “Why didn’t we notice all of this when we entered the system?” Blaylock said, turning toward Burdick and Harding.

  Blaylock saw that Burdick’s eyes were glued to the screen. Pointing a shaking finger, he said, “Maybe because theydidn’t want us to?”

  Blaylock was unsurprised to see the ominous, doublebladed shape of a Romulan warbird rippling into existence on the viewer. I hate being right all the time,she thought mirthlessly.

  The Slaytonhad to be well within the range of the decloaking warship’s weapons. The Romulan vessel was more than twice the Slayton’s size, and her disruptor ports glowed with menace. And the Slaytonwas dead in space.

  But Blaylock told herself that the warbird’s captain wouldn’t harbor any hostile intent. With so little really known about the Geminus Gulf, why would the Romulans want to risk starting a war over it?

  Then the warbird fired.

  The Slaytonlurched again, and the lights failed once more. Blaylock wondered how long it would take for the warp core to lose antimatter containment. And just what it was the Romulans knew about this place that she didn’t.

  The bridge flared into cerulean brilliance a moment later, followed immediately by more blackness. This time, the dark was absolute and eternal.

  The Archimedescontinued its descent through Chiaros IV’s storm-tossed Dayside atmosphere. Zweller ignored the low conversational murmurs passing between the department heads and concentrated on his piloting chores. Though the inertial dampers succeeded in canceling out most of the turbulence, Zweller could still feel the deck shimmying slightly beneath his boots. And the structural integrity field was being taxed far more than usual.

  Adjusting the viewer to compensate for the ball of white-hot plasma that now completely surrounded the shuttle’s hull, Zweller quietly admired the savage beauty of the landscape quickly scrolling by below. It was a place of immiscible contrasts, irresistible forces in perpetual stalemate. It was a place he could understand.

  As the Archimedesentered the nightward terminator, Zweller reduced the craft’s velocity, lowering the hull temperature and making the plasma fires gutter out. He brought the shuttle down toward a range of cheerless brown mountains and arced into a northeasterly heading. In seconds, the craft cleared the peaks, and the relentlessly baked Dayside gave way to a fog-shrouded valley. Auroral flashes arced repeatedly across the sky, leaping the planet’s everlasting twilight belt, momentarily linking day with night. The vapor dispersed as the ground grew nearer and unveiled a quiltwork of hardscrabble farmland and narrow roads. Small settlements and isolated dwellings hove into view and just as quickly passed away. A great cityscape glittered in the haze, barely perceptible on the northern horizon. It appeared to fade toward a tumble of dry hills and barren escarpments that extended into the planet’s dark side as far as Zweller could see. Lights twinkled across the city’s remote nightward periphery.

  “Looks like we’ve found the planet’s single worthwhile piece of real estate,” Gomp said with a porcine chortle.

  Finishing a long countdown in his head, Zweller thought: It’s time.

  An alarm light suddenly flashed on Zweller’s console, and a klaxon brayed a warning. The tactical display at Zweller’s left side came to life.

  “What is it?” Roget said, sounding cautious, though not particularly alarmed.

  “I think we’re about to have some company,” said Zweller.

  “A Chiarosan honor guard?” Hearn ventured.

  Zweller felt his jaw clenching involuntarily. “I . . . I don’t think so.”

  “Shields up!” Roget shouted. “Red alert!”

  Something struck the shuttle at that moment, making the hull reverberate like an enormous bell. The engineer and the doctor fell into a heap atop Liz Kurlan. Tim Tuohy, the head of planetary studies, helped Gomp get his hooves beneath him. Everyone scrambled back into their seats and activated the crash harnesses.

  The shuttle rocked again, more violently than before, as though punched by a giant. His harness kept Zweller from being spilled from his seat. Though partly obscured by static, the tactical display showed a fast-approaching trio of small, aggressively contoured vessels. They appeared to be fighter craft of an unusual configuration. Zweller recognized them as Chiarosan.

  “Status!” Roget shouted, trying to compete with the rumbling of the hull.

  “Shields and weapons are off-line,” Zweller said. “I can’t keep anything working with all this atmospheric ionization.”

  A static-swept male voice, deep and harsh, emanated from the comm system. “Federation shuttle: You will follow our lead vessel’s navigation beam into Nightside. Consider yourselves our prisoners.”

  Roget spat a nearly inaudible curse before replying. “We are here on a diplomatic mission at the invitation of First Protector Ruardh, the head of this world’s duly elected government. On whose authority have you attacked us?”

  “Had we attackedyou, you would be dead,” came the reply. “You are in the custody of the Army of Light. If you attempt to resist or flee, we will not hesitate to destroy your vessel.”

  Roget made a slashing gesture, and Zweller responded by temporarily interrupting the audio.

  “Make best speed for the capital, Mr. Zweller,” Roget said. “There are bound to be official patrols there who can drive these characters off.”

  Zweller shook his head emphatically. “They’re right on top of us, sir. We’ll never make it.”

  The shuttle lurched again and the hull braces groaned. Zweller watched the structural integrity telltale dip into the red. A near-miss,Zweller thought; a direct hit probably would have breached the hull and blown everyone out of the shuttle. The lights flickered as the batterypowered backup life-support system kicked in.

  Roget’s frown could have curdled milk. “You don’t seem to be trying very goddamned hard, mister.”

  Raising an eyebrow, Zweller ignored the comment. “I don’t think our welcoming committee enjoys being kept waiting, sir.”

  After pausing to glare at Zweller, Roget tapped a command into the console, relinquishing control of the shuttle’s navigational computer to their captors. He turned toward the somber group in the seats behind him.

  “Looks like we’re taking an unscheduled detour, folks.”

  “Never a cop around when you need one,” Gomp muttered. Nobody laughed.

  The Archimedesabruptly banked and descended even farther. The shuttle barely cleared the hills beyond the sprawling city’s nightward side as she continued into utter blackness, flanked by her “escorts.”

  Chiaros IV had no natural satellites and possessed a thick cloud canopy, conditions that made Nightside quite dark, except when the clouds were riven by
lightning and auroral fireworks. The Archimedes’trajectory, however, stayed mostly within the swirls of the clouds blown in from Dayside, cover that made the auroras—and therefore the ground—difficult to see from the shuttle’s windows. The few flashes of light that did enter the cabin merely served to prevent the crew’s eyes from adjusting to the darkness. To the hapless occupants of the Archimedes,Nightside appeared more tenebrous than the inside of any tomb.

  After crossing the terminator into night, the Archimedesflew for more than an hour, changing directions sharply several times, banking and spiraling. Whether because of atmospheric effects or damage sustained in the attack, the onboard instruments couldn’t determine the shuttle’s location or even its altitude. Sitting behind his useless control panel, Zweller realized that he might as well have been blindfolded.

  Roget and the department heads somberly discussed their options, including whether or not they ought to open the weapons locker and put up some real resistance after landing. Though Gomp was the loudest proponent of the “stand-and-fight” notion, Zweller suspected that it was all rhetoric; he’d never met a Tellarite who didn’t prefer a loud, abusive argument to actual combat. After everyone had spoken his piece, Roget announced that they were to forget about fighting their way out of this situation; after all, they had come to conduct diplomacy, not warfare.

  They received a hail, and the crew cabin fell silent. “Prepare to land,” said the harsh voice of their captor over the background of static.

  A pattern of lights appeared on the ground, perhaps a quarter of a kilometer below the shuttle. Roget tried to turn the landing over to the computer, but it again failed to respond. Zweller tripped the manual override and began bringing the craft down, aiming for the center of the landing pattern.

  A moment after the shuttle came to rest, the ground itself began to sink. Enormous mechanisms groaned as the surface beneath the shuttle lowered into a dimly illuminated subterranean chamber. Zweller watched on the viewer as a metal roof quickly rolled into place about eight meters overhead, shutting out what could be seen of the obsidian sky.

  “I’ll bet this place is completely invisible from the air,” Gomp said, sounding impressed. “Very neat.”

  A bank of bright lights flared to life along the chamber’s ceiling, revealing its enormous size. Several small fighter craft of the same type as their attackers were parked nearby. Perhaps twenty large, armed humanoids were taking up positions surrounding the Archimedes.

  Kurlan and Tuohy both gazed significantly at the weapons locker, and then back at Roget, as if to say, This is our last chance.

  “No phasers,” Roget reiterated, and the rest of the human officers nodded their assent. Gomp spat a monosyllabic Tellarite curse.

  Roget fixed a steely gaze on Zweller, but Zweller met it unblinkingly. “Commander Zweller and I will go out first,” Roget said. “Unarmed.”

  Hearn opened the shuttle’s hatch manually, then stepped aside. Roget walked through it to meet their captors. Zweller followed, the planet’s slightly higher-than-Earth-normal gravity making his feet feel leaden.

  From what Zweller knew of Chiarosans, the soldiers of the Army of Light were fairly typical representatives of the species. A robust people, none of them were shorter than two meters. Zweller was immediately struck by the strangeness of their eyes, which were the color of iridescent cobalt, and had an almost crystalline appearance. Though broad in the shoulders, the Chiarosans were whipcord lean, their bare arms striated with muscles like steel cables, and half-covered with a fine, brown fur. The hairless portions of their skins resembled burnished copper, and shined almost as brightly as the long, curved blades that hung from the sashes of their gray uniforms. Their obvious strength was complemented by a fluid grace of motion, as though their musculoskeletal systems were capable of an impossibly wide range of motion.

  If one of these guys had helped us against those Nausicaans back in ’27, old Johnny Picard never would have needed that artificial heart.

  The troops wasted no time escorting everyone off of the shuttle. After taking the Starfleet officers’ combadges and searching them for weapons—as well as confiscating the phasers they had left aboard the Archimedes—the Chiarosans manacled the wrists of each of their six captives. The soldiers then frog-marched them out of the hangar complex, down a lengthy, narrow corridor, and then into a second large chamber. Several slim ceilingmounted illumination panels bathed the room in a dull white light. Zweller’s gaze took in the room’s bare stone walls and floor, which were adorned with edged weapons, as well as paintings and sculptures depicting what must have been important battles and revered war heroes from the annals of Chiarosan history.

  A pair of bare-chested Chiarosan males faced one another in the center of the room, neither of them acknowledging the presence of the Starfleet prisoners. The larger and more striking of the pair was yellow-haired; the smaller, darker Chiarosan appeared no less formidable, however. Both of them held long, curved blades in each of their hands, and were in the midst of sparring, their graceful, triple-jointed movements reminding Zweller of Japanese kata.Their limbs moved with unbelievable control and precision, almost faster than the eye could follow. Though their weapons clanged together forcefully, often striking sparks, both men obviously were exerting tremendous discipline over both blade and sinew. It occurred to Zweller that the trio of guards standing behind them were largely superfluous, present only to provide additional intimidation.

  Stepping inside the guard of the darker, smaller swordsman, the yellow-haired fighter suddenly trapped his opponent’s thick neck between his blades. Though both men abruptly froze in place, Zweller half-expected the victor to snip the other man’s head off, like a gardener trimming a shrub. Instead, the winner sheathed his blades after a moment, and the other man followed suit. The fighters bowed to one another.

  Shaking perspiration from his abundant hair, the winner of the contest turned toward the Starfleet contingent. The Chiarosan’s head made the motion first, turning almost 180 degrees before the rest of his body followed. He greeted his “guests” with a smile made eerie by his preternaturally wide mouth and his razor-sharp, silverhued teeth.

  “Clear water and rich soil to you, my guests,” he said in heavily accented but intelligible Federation Standard. “Please allow me to thank you for coming among us.”

  “You didn’t give us a great deal of choice in the matter,” Roget said, his face an impassive mask.

  The blond Chiarosan chuckled. His sparring partner merely stared belligerently at the captured officers.

  “My name is Falhain, and I command the Army of Light,” the yellow-haired Chiarosan said. “Allow me to introduce Grelun, my Good Right Hand.”

  Zweller heard Gomp muttering behind him. “And here I am without my dress uniform.”

  “Shut the hell up, Gomp,” Tuohy hissed. Sullenly, Gomp complied.

  Fortunately, Falhain appeared to be ignoring everyone except for Zweller and Roget, perhaps sensing from their body language that they were the senior officers present. Or maybe, Zweller thought, the Chiarosan rebels are familiar with Starfleet rank insignia.

  “As you may have gathered,” Falhain said, “my people are having . . . difficulty accepting our government’s plan to enter the Federation.”

  Zweller opened his mouth to reply, but Roget beat him to it. “Sir, abducting Federation citizens is hardly a constructive way to air your grievances.”

  “Desperate times prescribe desperate tactics,” Grelun said, his eyes narrowing to slits.

  Falhain nodded toward his lieutenant, then locked a humorless gaze upon Roget. “I will cut straight to the heart of our ‘grievances,’ as you so trivially characterize them: Ruardh, our world’s ‘duly elected leader,’ leads a government of murderers.”

  Zweller tensed. His superiors had not included that information in his mission briefing.

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “I’m talking about unanimity, my honored guests
,” Falhain said. “The kind of unanimity that earns a planet Federation membership. My people are paying the price for that unanimity. With their lives.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Roget said, shaking his head.

  “I speak for many of the outlying tribes and clans—a tiny minority of this planet’s population, to be sure—but a people who prize their tradition of independence. That independence is unpopular in the capital, where we are seen as little better than vermin who compete with the cities for water and arable land, which our world gives to no one in abundance.”

  “The Federation can help you resolve those problems, if you let us,” Roget said. “Besides, your alternative is far worse. The Romulan Empire isn’t likely to respect your people’s independence.”

  Falhain laughed mirthlessly. “The Romulans have never frightened us. Nor have they ever tried to conquer us.”

  “We have nothing that they want,” Grelun said.

  “Maybe Ruardh and her ministers don’t believe that,” Zweller said. After all, the Romulans always wantsomething.

  “Perhaps,” Falhain said. “But none of that matters. What doesmatter is that the Federation has allied itself with an ender-of-bloodlines.”

  His eyes as cold as a Nightside storm, Grelun addressed Zweller. “For the past six years, Ruardh’s people have been trying to extinguish the clans, to increase the cities’ share of our scarce subsistence resources. At last count, this has cost my people over 600,000 lives. Only a small fraction of that number survive, to fight on and avenge the murdered.”

  “What is your word for it, human?” Falhain said to Roget, who was blanching visibly. “ ‘Genocide?’ ”

  Zweller swallowed hard, taking in the enormity of Falhain’s charges. If they were true, then how much worse could Romulan rule actually be for these people?

  “So now you’re abducting noncombatants?” Roget said.

  Falhain bared his teeth, making Zweller think of a cornered animal. “Unlike Ruardh, we have at least confined our targets to those wearing uniforms. And as long as the Army of Light answers to me, we will continue to strike only at the guilty.”